What hosting criteria is taken into consideration while signup up with a hosting company? What do you think?
It never hurts to do some research on the host you are considering also. Read some reviews, get some opinions, etc. Better to see if they have a bad history before you go with them. Your budget also plays a huge part in what you can look for.
1. Large Bandwidth. You must have decent bandwidth. I would suggest the company has at least two T3 pipelines on their system 2. SSL encryption. This allows for a secure shopping cart. This is a must for e-commerce sales. If you do not have a secure shopping cart, very few will buy from you. 3. One Gigabyte. At least one Gigabyte of (1024 MB) of available daily transfer. This will allow you to grow with your site and not have to worry about extra charges.
I couldn't help but comment on this, seeing as you apparently run a hosting company. You realize that 2 T3s are only 90mbps of bandwidth combined, right? That's far less than most single dedicated servers. I would certainly hope that any hosting company out there would have considerably more bandwidth available than that on the entire system. Heck, each of their individual servers should have more available bandwidth than that.
In general you should check uptime and support (customer reviews). The most important thing is your website is online so you need a high uptime and fast support if you have any questions. Afterwards you can check for ressources and maybe compare prices but most of the time the cheap hosting companies only offer poor service and resources (check what WSWD just posted above)
Some webhosting providers offer coupons where you can pay $1 for the first month so you have an opportunity trying their service. You should find out about this alternative.